GOP chases youth vote with Uber

Republicans love Uber. Young urban voters love Uber. And Republicans hope that means young voters can learn to love the GOP.

Car-hailing and ride-sharing services like Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and others are wildly popular among wealthy, young, tech-savvy urbanites — precisely the kind of voters that the Republican Party needs to win over to remain competitive in the long run. Those same services also just happen to be warring with government regulators in cities across the country over whether the upstarts are operating illegally as unlicensed taxi services.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Republicans see it as the perfect opportunity to help sell the GOP’s free-market, lower-regulation message to a younger generation of voters they’ve struggled to win over in the past few elections and who often feel alienated by the GOP’s social conservatism.

On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee pounced, launching a petition to support Uber saying “taxi unions and liberal government bureaucrats are setting up roadblocks, issuing strangling regulations and implementing unnecessary red tape to block Uber from doing business in their cities.”

”We don’t need the intrusive government implementing any more strangling regulations, limiting consumer choices or interfering in the free market,” the RNC email argued. “But this isn’t about one company or concept. This is about protecting the core principles that make our country so great: our free market principles, our entrepreneurial spirit and our economic freedom.”

Trey Grayson, former Republican Secretary of State for Kentucky who also served as the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, said Uber users, “generally speaking, love it.”

“It’s a way for the party to reinforce the message that here’s a private company serving a need — and the need is created because government regulation created poor services,” he said.

Grayson, who studied generational political behavior at Harvard, said many younger voters show a streak of libertarianism combined with a deep distrust of both government and big institutions that makes rallying around Uber, Sidecar and other sharing economy services a smart message.

“If you’re a Republican, conservative or libertarian looking at millennials who have generally voted Democrat, your silver lining is that there’s this freedom interest that they have,” Grayson said in an interview.

Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster who runs the firm Echelon Insights, said Uber’s city-by-city trench warfare “created this poster child example of what happens when the status quo uses government regulation to keep competition out of the market.” She added: “It doesn’t feel ideological, but it creates this example for what Republicans have been saying all along.”

In a statement, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus praised the role of innovators and companies shaking up old markets — and said government shouldn’t stand in the way of the innovation that consumers clearly want.

“When new companies and new technology come along, it’s not the government’s job to protect the old way of doing things. Government shouldn’t pick winners and losers. They certainly shouldn’t block innovation, which can make life easier and more affordable, just so an existing monopoly isn’t threatened,” Priebus said. “When legislators over-regulate, it’s consumers who pay the price.”

Republicans are also working to highlight the issue of Uber and innovation in several races across the country — including in Illinois, where Gov. Pat Quinn is weighing whether to sign a bill that would require Uber drivers to obtain a chauffeur’s license if they work more than 18 hours a week. The company claims that would effectively kill its low-cost UberX service in the Land of Lincoln.